GNU Make vs Webpack

Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.

Other build tools need wrapper modules to do certain tasks. The biggest disadvantage of these wrapper modules is that they bind you to a version of that tool. With Make you don't have that problem, there's no need for wrappers and no tools to bind you to a version, you can use any version of Make that you want.

Since it's written in C and can be found in all UNIX-based systems it can be used on platforms other than node.js.

Plugins and loaders are easy to write and allow you to control each step of the build, from loading and compiling CoffeeScript, LESS and JADE files to smart post processing and asset manifest building.

Using Webpack opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.

Webpack allows you to split your codebase into multiple chunks. Chunks are loaded on demand. This reduces the initial loading time.

Source maps allow for easier debugging, because they allow you to find the problems within the origin files instead of the output file.

Webpack supports ES6 modules and their import and export methods without having to compile them to CommonJS require

Because Webpack allows you to use the same require() function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.

Webpack supports AMD and CommonJS module styles. It performs clever static analysis on the AST of your code. It even has an evaluation engine to evaluate simple expressions. This allows you to support most existing libraries.

Webpack supports using all three module types, even in the same file.